I voted for the “harm reduction” vote in the 2016 Presidential election. Mar Roxas wasn’t great, but he was better than Duterte. Surprise, surprise, Duterte won. Hundreds of thousands died.
For the 2022 Presidential election, I voted for a principled vote for Leody de Guzman. Surprise, surprise, the Marcos dynasty returns to power.
Then people are treating Biden/Trump round 2 as top priority. Newsflash, if democracy was at stake in the election, then you don’t have democracy. I’ve been watching the Biden administration from afar. Biden, Trump, they’re the same. Same killer police. Same concentration camps at the border. Same prison industrial complex. Same trans genocide. Same abortion bans. No meaningful climate action. And now, a genocide in Gaza. Biden doesn’t care. Voting isn’t harm reduction.
Bruh I don’t care about US jobs and inflation. I care about US imperialism. That will never be on the ballot, neither in my country or in yours.
Second, your analysis on fascism is upside down. Fascists do not rely on passivity, no the exact opposite: fascism relies on proletarian mobilization mobilized for reaction. Fascism makes proletarians identify with their power. Donald Trump lost the popular vote; passivity wasn’t the problem—he was broadly rejected! Liberals had their victory but the game was rigged. In my country, both Duterte and Marcos got people to identify with their power and proletarians mobilized under and for this image of power. Fascism formost relies not on mass passivity but mass activity. It relies on mass politics albeit one turned upside down.
The Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t really do anything to combat inflation, it’s a poor name. I linked a video about it that goes into greater detail of what it practically entails. And with the Jobs act, I tried to highlight how significant of a role that legislation will have in getting the US off fossil fuels, which, like I get it, that seems inconsequential when your country and others like yours are being subjected to imperialism RIGHT NOW, but I emphasize it because climate change is something that affects us all, and to demonstrate that who wins this stupid election does have downstream effects that matter for everyone for a long time to come, climate wise.
We collectively do not have a lot of time to fuck around with getting off fossil fuels, so any big step in that direction is, IMO, critical. But that’s just my 2 cents.
I mean… Yes, for the most part that is true with the electoral college, and @Five@slrpnk.net’s post here about how the swing states are the only votes that matter is mostly true (though I still would argue it’s good to vote even in the more ‘secure’ states just to be on the safe side).
However, I’m not sure that was the case with Hitler’s rise, and as my linked post shows, he didn’t win the popular vote, the less bad option could’ve been chosen had the Germans ‘defensively’ voted back then.
But, yeah, I’m not going to defend the US’s electoral system, it is absolutely a joke, I agree, but the result is not set in stone, it’s still absolutely worth fighting, because it’s going to be very close.
That’s certainly much harder to fight against if the majority are already down for it, especially when things were pretty dire. It sounds like it was very similar to Italy during the rise of Mussolini, where seemingly it was inevitable due to him having a significant majority vote.
I think my voting suggestions only work if the fascist party isn’t already going to win the majority vote by a landslide (But even then, it’s best to vote anyway, just in case polls were misleading).
Also, I was only bringing up US politics because I’m already familiar with the historical ramifications of ‘less bad’ voting here, which has shown a trajectory of when ‘full bad’ wins, things get way worse, which for me just highlights that a passive stance toward voting doesn’t really bring any sort of tangible benefits, whereas defensively voting (at least historically in the US), has shown to be worth the effort to vote.
I don’t know if that’s the case for your country, or for others, but I would guess that it may apply there as well. You said yourself that when Durerte won, hundreds of thousands died. If you believe that those lives wouldn’t have died if the less-bad guy had won, then your vote was worth making, even if it ultimately didn’t work, because there wasn’t a zero-sum chance that it wouldn’t have worked.
I guess I advocate for voting for ‘less bad’ because game-theory and history has shown to a sufficient degree that the harm reduction is worthwhile.